


Family and Politics

by nagi_schwarz



Series: Blood and Water [8]
Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-10
Updated: 2016-11-10
Packaged: 2018-08-30 05:17:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,806
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8519962
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nagi_schwarz/pseuds/nagi_schwarz
Summary: Written for the comment_fic prompt: "Stargate Atlantis, Rodney McKay, he doesn't realize just how much his staff looks after him until the system breaks down."Rodney runs out of coffee and sets out on a quest to get it back.





	

Rodney stared at the empty coffee pot for a full minute before it hit him. The lab was out of coffee.

He whirled around, empty mug in hand. “Who - what - where’s the coffee?”

Kusanagi, who was attempting to build a model of the latest data they’d pulled off of the ZPM interface on the kids’ planet, glanced up briefly. “There should be some in the cupboard below.”

Rodney hadn't even realized there were cupboards installed in the workbenches, because there were no handles, and he had to do some creative hand-waving before the drawer hissed open, like a crystal tray, only deeper and wider.

It was empty.

Rodney told Kusanagi so.

She lifted her head sharply, alarmed. Then she tapped on her radio and demanded to speak to Parrish. After a harried conversation, during which Kusanagi’s expression went from alarmed to angry to terrified, Kusanagi let her hand fall to her side.

“Dr. Parrish says Greenhouse Three cannot provide more coffee seeds until the Chemists on Pier Twenty-Seven make their promised delivery.”

“That makes zero sense.” Rodney stared at Kusanagi, baffled.

Kusanagi said, “Maybe you should speak to Dr. Maxwell, then.”

Dr. Maxwell was the chief chemist and was largely missing from his lab because he was an explosives expert and the Marines had sort of adopted him.

Rodney, still clutching his mug, went to find Dr. Maxwell. He found the man, in all his long-haired glory, hanging out at the shooting range with Lieutenant Cadman and a cohort of her young Marine admirers.

Maxwell had several spray bottles of cleaning solutions, Cadman had a handful of hair pins, and the Marines were looking on in awe.

“It’s a simple recipe, which is what makes it good, and not just because the ingredients are easy to find on Earth - and Atlantis, thankfully,” Dr. Maxwell was explaining.

Rodney said, “Hey, Maxwell, I need to talk to you.”

The Marines looked put out that their fun was being interrupted, but Maxwell handed Cadman some hair pins and trotted toward Rodney.

“What’s up, Clansman?” Both of them had Scottish surnames but neither of them were Scottish. Maxwell was wearing a tartan kilt, though. He looked like a very butch Catholic schoolgirl beneath his lab coat.

“We’re out of coffee in the lab.”

“So?”

“So the botanists say they won’t give us coffee seeds till the chemists on pier whatever deliver something to them. Get it delivered.”

Maxwell jammed his hands into his belt on either side of his black leather sporran. “No can do, McKay, not till the mathematicians hold up their end of the bargain.”

“Bargain? What bargain?”

“You’ll have to ask Dr. Chang.”

Who was also a pet of the Marines, for his martial arts prowess.

Rodney sought out Dr. Chang, who informed him that anthropology owed mathematics, and anthropology was expecting something from a certain platoon of Marines, who were under strict orders not to deliver until they received something from zoology, and Rodney was pretty sure he was being led on a wild goose chase all over Atlantis over the damn coffee, and he was ready to kill someone.

With his bare hands.

But he worked his way up through the chain of unspecified deals and bargains and promises, and the source of the problem was Lorne.

Lorne owed Marie in the infirmary a batch of moon cakes, and he hadn’t delivered, and if he kept holding things up, she was going to raise her price, which would just have nasty effects downstream, wouldn't it?

“What the hell kind of racket is Lorne running?” Rodney demanded.

Marie shrugged. “Business is business, McKay.” And she turned away from him.

Finding Lorne was even more complicated and difficult than figuring out the chain of supply for the Pegasus Coffee in the lab. No one had seen him, no one had heard from him, he wasn’t answering hails on radios or on the intranet IM system or email. He wasn’t registering on the life-signs detector, either. Chang and Chuck did some quick math, and the city was two life signs short, for how many people were scheduled to be on and off world at that given moment.

Rodney was caffeine-deprived, frustrated, tired, and he had the horrifying realization that he was about to cry when a familiar shadow loomed over him.

Ronon.

“What’s up, Rodney?”

“Have you seen Major Lorne? I need to find him. Immediately.”

Ronon shrugged. “Not recently, but last I saw, John wanted to talk to him.”

“How not recently was not recently?” Rodney asked.

Ronon blinked at him. Right. He didn’t wear a watch.

“We’re down two life signs,” Chang said. “The other one must be Sheppard.”

“Get Carter to hail him,” Rodney told Chuck. “He’ll answer her.”

Chuck stared at him. “Colonel Carter isn’t going to summon Colonel Sheppard on account of coffee.”

Did they not understand? Rodney needed coffee. The whole of physics and engineering needed coffee. Rodney was vital to Atlantis’s continued survival and coffee was vital to Rodney.

And then Rodney realized. Lorne and John were missing.

If Rodney was being deprived of precious caffeine because John and Lorne were making time for a booty call, Rodney was going to kill both of them. Starting with Lorne. Then he blinked. “John’s back?”

“Returned a couple of hours ago,” Chuck said.

Rodney frowned. “He didn’t come see me.”

“Major Lorne is his second-in-command,” Chang pointed out. “After Carter, he’s most vital for Sheppard to talk to.”

“No he’s not,” Rodney snapped, only Chang didn’t know about John and Lorne. After Elizabeth and Carson had left gaping absences in senior command, the only people who knew about John and Lorne were John and Lorne and the rest of John’s team.

Chang huffed. “Whatever. Find Sheppard, find Lorne. Sheppard was gone for a week. There’s a lot Lorne will have to update him on.”

Rodney was pretty sure John was tapping Lorne as Chang spoke. Bastard.

“Are all the jumpers accounted for?” Rodney asked. “Did they take one?”

Chuck prodded one of the consoles. “All jumpers accounted for.”

John and Lorne had the strongest ATA gene expressions on the expedition, now that Carson was gone (Carson was stronger than Lorne). They probably had way to make themselves invisible to the LSDs, which was probably extremely convenient, given that they were breaking a thousand different rules by banging each other on the regular.

And then inspiration struck. The jumpers. Of course. During the body swap incident that no one was supposed to speak about (and that Rodney suspected had never actually been documented), Lorne had described John’s connection with Atlantis (for Rodney’s scientific benefit, of course, and not just his nosiness). He’d said John’s connection was stronger, and also he had a connection with his favorite jumper, Jumper One. (Rodney also thought it was silly that John had named the thing Delilah.)

Rodney scooped up his datapad and his distressingly empty coffee mug and made his way to the jumper bay and proceeded to attack Delilah with a screwdriver. Given how caffeine-deprived and angry Rodney was, he was impressed at his own ability to use Delilah’s connection to John to triangulate his location on her LSD and open a radio link to him.

Rodney tapped the radio on and cleared his throat, prepared to make a grand - and admittedly smug and then angry - entrance, and then he heard John.

John sounded furious.

“We’re going in circles and I’m fucking sick of it. What did your family have to do with my father’s death?”

Rodney froze, blinked at the console. It was transmitting live.

Lorne sounded exhausted. “I don’t know. I cut off ties with them as soon as we got back from Boston. Ran away from home, changed my name, finished high school, went to the Academy, surveyed at random bases till I got read into the program to be assigned to a gate team. I’ve told you this a thousand times.”

“Dave said you did something before you left Boston. That you started something with the Armenians, and your family gained a foothold in the city, and they decided to make a move on my father’s territory.”

Rodney huffed in disbelief. John sounded like a spoiled feudal lord.

“What would your brother know about it? He was twelve when I was in Boston last.” For all the anger in his words, Lorne still sounded tired.

“I can only assume he learned it from the Armenians.” John paused. “You said you weren’t born into the Flanigans.”

“No, I wasn’t. My mother is Irish, though.”

“Then your father -”

“Was Samvel Davytyan.”

“Tigran Davytyan’s -”

“Youngest son.”

“What did you do, Evan?” John sounded breathless, and not in a good way.

“I stopped in to see one of my cousins before I left Boston. But it was strictly family, no business.”

“Apparently it turned into business.”

“They could just be blaming me because I’m gone.” Still, Lorne sounded so tired. Resigned. Rodney was terribly confused.

“Or because you -”

“Because I what? Because after I finished _disciplining_ Shortshanks and Skinner I went to Hakob and we got blind drunk so when I puked my guts out I could pretend it was the booze and not because I’d systematically dismantled two human bodies?”

“You - what?”

“I ran my own crew, John. I was the boss. My boys got out of line, my responsibility to bring them back in line - or make an example of them.” Lorne’s voice was ragged.

“Evan -”

“Don’t touch me!”

“Evan, please -”

“I didn’t have anything to do with your father’s death. It’s been two decades. If the Flanigans took up with the Davytyans, it wasn’t anything I did. The O’Haras married my mother off to Samvel for politics and she ran to the Flanigans. If the Flanigans wanted to cash in on my ties to the Davytyans, well, it was no secret, where I came from.” Lorne’s voice shook. “If all it takes is one word from your poisonous brother to turn on me like this -”

“My brother’s done. I put paid to the Sheppard empire when I was on Earth. But family is family.”

“My family is you.”

There was silence, then a soft exhale, which Rodney was pretty sure was a prelude to a kiss. He shut off the transmission, shaken and confused.

He crept out of the jumper and walked back to the lab the long way, datapad and coffee mug in hand, his mind spinning.

By the time he got back to the lab, the coffee machine was on, a new pot was brewing, and Kusanagi assured him that all was restored.

But John and Lorne didn’t talk to each other for a week, John quiet and curt, Lorne silent and impossible to find.

Just when Rodney thought things were getting better, he fell down a mine with Jennifer and Carter.


End file.
